“I don’t feel well, but I haven’t the heart to go alone. I should only get melancholia.” “Hal seemed to think I ought to offer you a little companionship.” He said it with a slightly bashful air. “Hal?…” in a sharp, questioning voice. “What has Hal been saying to you?” “Not much. She was in great form at the Bruces’ last night. She rubbed it into me finely on various subjects, and finally went off with her head in the air to find some one refreshingly ugly who could talk sense.” They both laughed, but Lorraine’s eyes were thoughtful. “And what did she say about your companionship?” “Oh, that it was only some one to talk to and be company you wanted if you went away, and that I seemed to fill the post better than any one just now.” He paused, then added: “Do I?” She felt him looking hard into her face, and kept her eyes lowered. She did not want him to know that the thought of his companionship in the country was like the straw to the drowning man—the last joy to the condemned one. “You always make me forget the years, and feel young,” she said slowly and thoughtfully, “and I dare say that is a very good tonic in itself.” “You oughtn’t to need help from any one for that”; and she knew there was genuine admiration in his voice. “You never look anything but young. I suppose it is temperament.” “Temperatment doesn’t erase lines,” with a little sad smile. “Perhaps not, but it makes them, in some way, suit you; and they add to the character in a face.” “It is sweet of you to say so, Alymer, but it sounds a fairy tale. I don’t so very much mind growing old, if only it were not so… empty-handed.” “But surely you have so much!” “Not very much that counts. Anyhow, I hope some day you will have a great deal more.” “You are depressed. You must really get away somewhere at once.” He was grandfatherly now, the mood she always loved and laughed at, and her pulses quickened to it. He placed one of his large, strong-looking hand over hers—it covered them both out of sight—and he leaned a little nearer as he said: “I can see I shall have to take the ordering of it all. You have done worlds for me. Now I shall have to take you in hand.” A harsh expression crossed her face for a moment, thinking of what his mother had written her. “And go straight to perdition!” she said bitterly. He winced a little. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to make excuses for my own mother,” he remarked, with the quiet dignity that was already winning his name in the Law Courts, side by side with his gift for light satire. “You cannot but know in your heart just how far removed her outlook on the world is from ours.” She wanted to ask him if any outlook gave one woman the right to insult another at her pleasure, but she remembered Mrs. Hermon probably did not realise that she would have the fineness to see the insult, and was not even aware that she had been insulting. “I should like you to know my father,” he went on. “He is a very understanding man.”